By TOM O’LINCOLN

This is chapter six of Tom’s Years of Rage: Socialist Conflicts in the Fraser Era, Bookmarks Australia, Melbourne 1993. The main topic is anti-nuclear struggles in the late '70s and early '80s. The sources were mostly newspaper articles.

In recent times millions of people have fought to protect the planet from nuclear power, nuclear war, and a vast array of environmental disasters. Marxists have been among the campaigners, raising the controversial argument that only organised labour has the social power to banish these threats. From this perspective the Fraser years assume particular importance, because the 1970s were the decade when Australia's class and environmental issues converged in two major campaigns: the fight against construction of a power station at Newport, Victoria and the national struggle to stop uranium mining. Two other campaigns in Fraser's last years, around disarmament and the Franklin River, unfortunately saw these strands drawing apart once more.

In 1967 the State Electricity Commission of Victoria began planning to build a power station at Newport in Melbourne's working class western suburbs, opting for natural gas as the cheapest fuel. However by 1971 Williamstown residents were worried about pollution, and the local Conservation and Planning Society began holding public meetings. By 1972 they had convinced some unions to ban construction until an independent inquiry was held, and Trades Hall banned the project in 1974, amidst concerns that it would waste the State's natural gas reserves.

Although new development projects were supposed to face environmental tests, it was not until community opposition had built up that an assessment of Newport was even considered. Even then the Environmental Protection Authority's (EPA) terms of reference were limited, and its chairman said some important issues had been ignored, including the desirability of siting the power station at Newport and of using natural gas. Critics in the community demanded an unrestricted inquiry by the Parliamentary Public Works Committee but the government turned a deaf ear. Finally in October 1974, after Premier Hamer had read a long reply to questions, Federated Engine Drivers' secretary Stan Williams exploded:

When other union leaders agreed, Hamer was taken aback: "We cannot physically take a man and make him build a power station. We have just got to reconsider the matter." At this stage the Premier was not at all confident. Still there were those in Cabinet who thought they could "take a man and make him build a power station", and within days they had reaffirmed the Newport site.

The issue subsided during the upheavals of 1975, reviving in April 1976. By this time the industrial climate had changed. Recession had weakened the unions, and an anti-union government was in power federally. The Trades Hall right wing, led by Ken Stone, began looking for a way to dump the bans. While he had declared on 9 March that the bans would stay, The Age of 3 April published a 10 point compromise plan agreed by the Government and the Trades Hall executive. The State government undertook not to build any more metropolitan power stations, to confine Newport's operation to meeting peak load requirements and to consult more in future, along with various other concessions. Construction was still to proceed, so the deal was far from acceptable. Even so, the element of compromise was a second indication that sections of the government lacked resolve, so that a determined union stand might be able to stop the whole project.

Newport dominated the Trades Hall meeting on 8 April, at which demonstrators warned the delegates that Hamer could not be trusted. Stan Williams, and Charlie Faure of the Electrical Trades Union, declared that although they were on a committee appointed to negotiate, they'd known nothing of this deal. The Plumbers also came out against the compromise but John Halfpenny remained noticeably silent. A vote was postponed until 6 May.

Far from seeing the government's proposals as a sign of weakness, Halfpenny's Communist Party backers now began outlining a rationale for accepting them, with Tribune saying that "disappointment at the latest turn of events should not blind people to the new possibilities". Tribune remained rather vague about these possibilities except to suggest a campaign around urban planning, which would apparently be more effective because the 10-point plan had established "the right of the union movement and other movements to actively intervene in environmental issues". This was a curious argument to advance in favour of ending an actual intervention. In fact it was widely believed that Halfpenny was the author of the 10-point plan, although he had been obliged to back away from it by the AMWU State Council.

A group of left unions fought the deal and won reaffirmation of the original ban by 152 votes to 94, but neither Stone nor the government could accept this defeat. In early September Hamer released a letter he had written to Stone. The Trades Hall secretary then quietly organised a meeting of selected unions, hoping to put together a majority for compromise. Several left officials who heard about the meeting turned up at the door to protest, and in the end the meeting decided nothing. In November the compromise was again rejected, 179 to 175.

Hamer was furious. Within 24 hours he announced that no new public works projects would begin until the Newport dispute was settled and that the government would defer some existing projects. A new law would require secret ballots for bans of the Newport type, on pain of deregistration. In November he announced suspension of nearly 300 projects.

Bob Hawke called the legislation "the most repressive in Australia's history" while Ken Stone warned darkly that a general strike was "not beyond the realms of possibility," but the defiance was merely a pose. The Trades Hall right again began pushing for compromise, and some of Newport's opponents were now becoming nervous. The union officials, who had never campaigned systematically around the issue among their membership, feared that these members -- influenced by rising unemployment -- might dislike a ban that was costing hundreds of jobs. Some were intimidated by the government's sabre-rattling, though Hamer's threats were largely empty since a number of the projects were not very labour intensive, and to some extent the government was simply making expected budget cuts. The legislation would also be hard to enforce.

In any case, the balance of sentiment was shifting at Trades Hall. The State Labor Advisory Council (ALP and Trades Hall) now called for an inquiry, and on 25 November the Trades Hall Council voted again. Ken Carr of the Furnishing Trades moved an amendment accepting an inquiry but ruling out the Newport site as an option, but he was unsuccessful. For the first time, Newport's opponents lost a vote -- and convincingly, by 145 to 77. The left had split, and John Halfpenny had declared himself at last, voting along with the rest of the AMWU against Carr and for compromise.

After initially rejecting the Trades Hall proposal, Hamer negotiated with Stone, then established a review panel featuring Sir Louis Matheson, former Vice Chancellor of Monash. Since Matheson was known for his feuds with radical students, unionists believed he was unlikely to favour the anti-Newport cause. With representatives of the Gas and Fuel Corporation and the EPA (which had already approved Newport) on the panel, it was clearly designed to rubber stamp the project, though THC president Jack Ellis was also included. Yet Trades Hall endorsed it by an overwhelming vote on 21 December, the first public indication that it might not be entirely serious about opposing Newport. Concerned at this, demonstrators from the Western Suburbs Campaign Against Newport picketed a February meeting of the THC, demanding it stand firm.

The panel reported twice. Its "interim" report indicated even a half-sized, 500 megawatt power station at Newport would do considerable environmental damage. Accordingly the Trades Hall Council unanimously rejected Newport as a site, and acting secretary Tony Vella said the project was a "dead duck".

So the unions were startled when the final report opted, after all, for Newport, though for a smaller station. The critics lashed out. Jack Ellis had dissented from the finding. The final report was poorly argued; for example, a site at Hazlewood in the Latrobe Valley was unacceptable because of potential pollution -- so why was Newport OK? Ellis released documents showing the panel had rejected the Newport site by a 3 to 1 majority only 12 days before reporting to the government, adding that two members had changed their vote under political pressure. The left unions' newspaper Scope referred acerbically to the "iron rule of politics, that governments only set up commissions and inquiries when they can be assured that the result will confirm their policies and intentions."

Trades Hall reaffirmed the ban, while the government prepared to start construction. "What the consequences will be we hardly dare to contemplate," said The Age. What few expected, perhaps, was that the unions would make almost no fight at all.

When the government advertised for building workers, Norm Gallagher radiated confidence. "They'll probably clean the joint up, that's all," said Gallagher. "[Lindsay] Thompson has apparently got the barrow ... he'll have to push it." John Halfpenny was equally cocky. "Maybe they can get some people to chip some grass, turn a few sods or build a path."

Three weeks later Halfpenny was not so dismissive, rather he was warning against attempts "to bust union opposition by the use of scab labour", but alas by now it was not just random scabs: seven unions, observing that Trades Hall wasn't serious, had allowed members to work at the site.

By late June, with 150 people working there, some left unions finally stirred themselves. Officials of five organisations visited to warn the scabs they risked blacklisting if they didn't leave. Only about a dozen responded, yet Trades Hall remained complacent. True, some unions issued warnings to subcontractors. Postal and telecommunications employees refused to connect phones to the site. But these were token actions. Newport, many officials continued to insist, could never be built without union labour.

Local citizens and radical activists thought differently. As early as April a group of protesters had invaded a Trades Hall Council meeting with signs reading: "Does the THC support scabs? If not, then do something about Newport." The deepening concern was reflected in a 300-strong public meeting at Williamstown in June, and in periodic pickets and rallies outside the site. In August, 200 demonstrators mixed it with police, who used considerable force to drive back the crowd. These events were followed a week later by a two-day vigil. Harry Van Moorst of the Anti-Newport Co-ordinating Committee announced "an immediate campaign to boycott contractors who are working on the Newport site."

Such calls, however, were largely bravado given the unions' failure to act. Van Moorst's comrades could engage in minor harassment, but to stop the scabs required mass picketing and industrial action to pressure Hamer into backing off. Some union officials, most notably Charlie Faure, joined demonstrations and brought a few shop stewards with them, but they did little to mobilise their rank and file (the nearby Williamstown Dockyards could have provided the forces for a serious mass picket.) The original excuse that Hamer would "never get the labour" now gave way to a second, that it was too late to stop the project. By September construction was ahead of schedule. A year later The Age wrote smugly that the station was "settling into the skyline". In March 1979 the paper claimed:

Sections of the ALP left fought to maintain formal opposition to the project, but it was futile. Food Preservers Union secretary Tom Ryan might tell Labor leader Frank Wilkes it was "suicide" to accept Newport, but the State Labor conference thought otherwise, including most of the Socialist Left. Bob Hawke could dismiss the diehards as a "phone-box minority". In 1980 Trades Hall lifted its bans. It availed the Electrical Trades Union's Ron Luckman little to complain that some unions had "sold their soul", for Ken Stone had a more practical argument: lifting the ban made possible a redundancy agreement for workers at the old Newport power station.

Given Trades Hall's dithering, were the Newport bans an artificial exercise? Many union officials seemed to doubt the reliability of their rank and file members, probably because they had made no serious effort to mobilise them. Yet there was evidence that the issue struck a chord among ordinary workers. Unionists at Williamstown later drove a man out of the dockyards on discovering he had worked at Newport; and Max Costello recalls customers at a western uburbs rock music shop watching anti-Newport demonstrators walk by and commenting sympathetically that "they wouldn't build the power station in [affluent] Toorak, would they?" The issue had the potential for an effective industrial struggle, but there was no credible force willing to lead it.

The anti-uranium campaign reached its height around the time that a pattern of defeat began to emerge for the labour movement generally. Ironically, however, this did not at first make the campaign harder to build. While the majority of workers had lost confidence in their ability to win large, set-piece struggles, a minority turned to uranium as a different sort of issue, a new terrain on which to keep fighting. Large sections of the population opposed uranium mining and sympathised with the idea of union action. In addition the issue appeared to some degree to continue the traditions of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. For these reasons, the new campaign offered a possibility of revitalising the class struggle.

Uranium had been controversial under Whitlam, but the main issue initially had been economic nationalism. Rex Connor had held up approval of new contracts for CRA's Mary Kathleen Uranium mine (MKU) until his patriotic resources policy was in place. At the same time CRA needed additional capital to fulfil existing contracts, so the Labor government underwrote a $17 million share issue to ensure 100 percent Australian ownership, appointing two directors: Treasury secretary Lenox Hewitt and Queensland union leader Jack Egerton. The pause imposed by Labor, which continued into the early Fraser years, was important as it allowed time for environmentalists to develop a strong anti-nuclear case and win over a chunk of public opinion -- including much of the trade union movement. The 1975 ACTU Congress called for a halt to mining pending a full inquiry.

This foreshadowed a brawl with Fraser, for from the time he seized power Fraser pursued two objectives fairly single mindedly: to get a green light for uranium mining by hook or by crook, and at the same time to break the back of the Aboriginal land rights struggle. The two were linked because key uranium deposits were on Aboriginal land.

Conflict first erupted on the union front in May 1976, when Townsville railway shunting supervisor Jim Assenbruck refused to couple trucks headed for Mary Kathleen. Assenbruck was sacked, his workmates struck, and industrial action halted all rail traffic in North Queensland. While top union leaders had little enthusiasm for the dispute (Queensland TLC secretary Fred Whitby called it "absurd") they were bound to defend a member sacked for implementing union policy. Ultimately a 24-hour national rail strike won a compromise, with Assenbruck keeping his job but agreeing not to block shipments. Although the attempt to enforce union bans had failed, it was a political bombshell, and while conservative politicians attacked the rail strike Geoff Mosley, Australian Conservation Foundation director, praised it:

A national union meeting decided in early June that mining could proceed at Mary Kathleen pending the forthcoming Ranger Inquiry, under the influence of Australian Workers' Union claims that 300 jobs were at stake. However the same unions voted a few weeks later to ban exports of uranium from MKU. Journalists travelled to Mary Kathleen to quote people such as the local garage proprietor, who thought "any bloke who says that uranium should stay in the ground is so silly they ought to take him out and shoot him." But such silliness was on the increase: an Age poll found 57 percent were concerned about the dangers posed by nuclear power, only 24 percent trusted scientists to solve the problems, and 76 percent wanted alternative energy sources "even if it costs a lot more".

The experts were also divided. One prominent scientist, pro-nuclear hawk Ernest Titterton, argued that "unless we are prepared to have an energyless, caveman style of society, mankind must have a new and very large energy source" and only nuclear power could fit the bill. Another, Macfarlane Burnet, responded by warning that nuclear facilities brought with them the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.

Making much of the initial political running for the opposing camps were the environmentalists and the mining companies, respectively. "Moderate" environmentalists looked to the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), while their more radical colleagues backed the activist Friends of the Earth (FOE). Right wing attacks on the "Friends of the Dirt", as Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen termed them, led to occasional ACF attempts to distance themselves from the radicals. The Foundation was particularly embarrassed when FOE unearthed a document, quoting ACF public relations officer Bob Howard and an MKU scientist apparently agreeing that FOE activists were "entirely destructive, naive and too dreadful for words".

Their opponents were the Uranium Producers' Forum and its spokesperson George Mackay, who spent large sums on efforts to rescue the industry's deteriorating public image. "As the opposition forces have become more aggressive, we have taken up the same position" said Mackay in 1977. He was referring mainly to protest actions by the umbrella organisation Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM), whose demonstrations the Forum monitored closely, but the industry was also shaken in 1976 by FOE's disclosure of leaked documents in which CRA head Rod Carnegie acknowledged "the possibility of terrorists getting hold of materials from which bombs could be made", and admitted that radioactive waste disposal "could not be proved to be safe".

The debate focused increasingly on the Ranger Inquiry charged with reporting on mining in the Northern Territory, where the key deposits lay. Justice Fox released his first report in October, but it resolved nothing because the contending factions each seized on sections that suited them. The Government and the Uranium Producers' Forum cited the first two recommendations, which said the hazards of uranium and nuclear power were not grounds to ban mining, milling or power stations "if those operations are properly regulated and controlled". The mining companies promptly declared the issue resolved.

However critics soon pointed out that other recommendations placed stringent and probably unachievable conditions: the government must be able to stop it at any stage (presumably by nullifying contracts), overseas customers must adopt unprecedented safeguards, and the government rather than the mining companies should control the whole process. When you added the Commissioners' obvious fears about nuclear weapons and their reported unhappiness with the "green-light" interpretation made by the government, the report could be read as a case for uranium bans. The second report, in May 1977, was equally inconclusive. Fox himself said it did "not lend itself to green and red light reporting any more than did the first".

The Fox Commission was a turning point for the anti-nuclear forces, who concluded that lobbying and making submissions wouldn't be enough to stop uranium mining. After the first report was released FOE, MAUM, the ACTU and the Australian Railways Union (ARU) held a joint press conference to announce they would launch a struggle "comparable to the campaign against the war in Vietnam". The next few years saw repeated mass demonstrations across the country demanding a ban on mining and export. The first round of 1977 set the tone. The largest mobilisation was in Melbourne, where MAUM was developing a sizeable network of local groups, some of them led by veterans of the Vietnam protest era. Local rallies were held in the suburbs, culminating in a major event in the Melbourne Town Hall on 30 March. On 1 April 10,000 rallied in the City Square. Speakers at the rallies around the country included ALP left personalities Joan Coxsedge and Tom Uren, and Aboriginal leaders Gary Foley and Marcia Langton. The importance of black speakers was later emphasised by Brisbane activist Ross Watson: "If blacks got land rights, real land rights, then there would be a lot less uranium going out of this country." A second round of rallies was held in August in conjunction with Hiroshima Day.

These large, peaceful "uranium moratoriums" became a feature of the late 1970s, but there were also smaller and more radical actions including confrontations on the wharves of Sydney and Melbourne. In June, demonstrators tussled with the cops for hours at Sydney's Glebe Island container terminal in a vain attempt to prevent yellowcake (uranium ore) being loaded on a ship. Then at the start of July, Melbourne activists won a victory at Swanson Dock.

The ship Columbus Australia, with yellowcake bound for Britain and Japan, arrived on 2 July in what MAUM convenor Jim Falk called a "try-on by the Fraser Government to make the export of uranium an established fact". Melbourne members of the Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF) black-banned the ship, only to be overruled by their federal executive which had a policy of fulfilling existing contracts. Hundreds of demonstrators then assembled on the dock, causing the ship's captain to raise the gangplank. That violated union safety rules and the wharfies stopped work. Finally police attacked the demonstrators, arresting about 30 of them, but this move only provoked the wharfies to again ban the ship.

Two days later a mass meeting made the ban permanent and the Columbus Australia departed, leaving behind a $1 million cargo. Although WWF federal secretary Norman Docker sought to distance his union from the anti-uranium movement ("we can have no sympathy for people who invade our work areas") the rank and file wharfies saw it differently. A job delegate doffed his cap to the demonstrators, saying: "We reckon you're lovely." It was an example of the kind of unity in struggle between environmentalists and unionists at the grassroots level which, if generalised, could have stopped the nuclear industry in its tracks. It had not been achieved through negotiations with officials, but through direct action.

As always, such confrontations raised fears that militancy would alienate public opinion, but the main effect was a dramatic increase in public interest. The Age was full of letters, including attacks both on the "greed-crazed exploiters" of the uranium industry and on the "communist parties" amongst the demonstrators. Assertions that nuclear power was "a great step forward in the conservation battle" jostled with warnings of dangers to "not just this generation but those of the next 500,000 years", while a call for mining in the "interests ... of the free world" stood alongside the blunt challenge: "Pro-uranium supporters should ask themselves if they would be happy to have a nuclear reactor on the block next door."

The wharfies' actions had also shown the power of organised workers to stop uranium. The movement began looking forward to the ACTU Congress in September, which was to see the first major debate among top union leaders.

Bob Hawke had been commenting for some time. In mid-July he said that despite wishing "the bloody stuff had never been found or heard of" he was for mining it eventually, after a wider debate. A few weeks later he accused nearly everyone else in the debate of "total dishonesty": one side thought only "of what will put a dollar in their pocket" but pretended to speak for the national interest; while the other leapt from pointing out the dangers of nuclear power to the "illogical" conclusion that these could be avoided by leaving Australian uranium in the ground. Such statements angered the activists, and he was heckled at an anti-Fraser rally in Sydney. Hawke stalked off the platform, branding the hecklers as "enemies of the working class".

Hawke's attempt to steer a middle course was rendered more difficult on 25 August when the Fraser Government approved full scale mining and export. The policy was carefully crafted to conform as much as possible to the Fox recommendations: sales only to countries which agreed to use uranium for peaceful purposes, Aborigines to get royalties and the right to negotiate directly with mining companies. But none of these measures came close to satisfying the protest movement. The next day seven of Australia's ten largest unions declared their total opposition, then began rallying their forces for the ACTU Congress.

Almost the entire fourth day of the Congress was devoted to the debate. The executive motion called for a referendum and threatened that without it, the union movement would ban the mining and transport of uranium. A left wing amendment, moved by Ralph Taylor of the ARU and seconded by the AMWU's Jim Roulston, proposed a meeting of unions involved in uranium mining, to endorse a ban on fulfilling existing contracts from Mary Kathleen. It was an occasion for fiery speeches, with Hawke stressing the referendum issue and challenging his opponents to concentrate on that ("tell the Australian people why you don't trust them"). Taylor rejected this focus and addressed issues such as waste disposal, before calling on unions to prepare for a "confrontation on our terms". As for a referendum, he said, unions shouldn't abdicate their "social responsibility".

Jim Roulston cited the effects on Aborigines while warning that a referendum would be rigged, since uranium supporters controlled the media. John Halfpenny followed with a passionate speech, recalling that the unions hadn't called for a referendum on issues such as Vietnam: "we set about persuading people, and took a stand." Hawke responded with a 49 minute oration. "It was a speech that drew jeers as well as applause," wrote one observer. "It also drew blood in unusual quantity." [R Martin in Journal of Industrial Relations 19 (4) 1977].

The amendment failed by 493 votes to 371, meaning that MKU could proceed and the referendum demand was the ACTU's only real policy. Fraser was to steadfastly ignore it.

Despite the ACTU's conservatism, public opinion continued to shift against uranium mining (an Age poll found opposition had risen from 34 percent in June to 42 percent in September) and the October round of protest marches was the largest yet, with 15-20,000 marching in Melbourne and Sydney. 1977 had been a year of advances for the movement. So great was the pressure on the ALP that South Australian Premier Don Dunstan campaigned for re-election on an anti-nuclear theme of "play it safe" -- though he kept his Uranium Enrichment Advisory Committee going just in case the wind changed.

By comparison, 1978 was at best a year of consolidation. Public concern was heightened by revelations that British nuclear waste had been dumped at Maralinga in South Australia during the fifties and sixties. Students Against Uranium Mining had sprung up in 1977, and numerous Sydney schools were leafleted in March 1978 prior to a mass rally. In Melbourne the environmental group INSPECT had branches in a number of high schools. On the other hand some local groups declined or collapsed; for example St Kilda MAUM in Melbourne, which had mobilised scores of people in 1977, had to be set up again from scratch in the following year.

Though it was sometimes compared with the movement against the Vietnam war, the anti-uranium struggle was proving less dynamic. It never dominated the public mood in the same way, and it did not draw as many new people into activity -- rather it relied to a considerable degree on veterans of the earlier movement. Moreover it didn't have the same radicalising impact. While socialists were involved, the anti-uranium campaign did not generate any significant layer of new revolutionary activists. This was partly because by 1978 it was showing all the signs of ending in the same disappointing fashion as other mass struggles against Fraser, suffocated by the foot-dragging of the official union leaders. It was also partly because a majority of the left was starting to draw pessimistic conclusions and drift rightward. This was not an easy climate for even a significant minority to move to the left. The activists were more likely to be attracted to a narrow focus on environmental issues, or to moralistic politics such as pacifism.

Meanwhile Fraser was pressing ahead, making a deal with the Philippines dictatorship to build a reactor on a site widely believed to be unsafe (the Aquino Government later did abandon the site which was located on a fault line). Next he imposed a deal on the Aboriginal Northern Lands Council to develop not only Ranger but also a second mine at Nabarlek.

The trend was the same at State level, with WA Liberal Premier Charles Court proposing to build a nuclear reactor within 100 kilometres of Perth, and even Don Dunstan no longer wishing to "play it safe". Encouraged by his adviser Ben Dickinson, a prominent mining industry figure, Dunstan went overseas on a fact-finding tour clearly intended to lay the basis for developing uranium deposits at Roxby Downs. Only his resignation due to illness forestalled a change of policy.

In the industrial sphere a meeting of 12 key unions in March 1979, in what one unnamed official called "a gutless and disgraceful performance" gave in to pressure from Hawke and effectively decided that uranium could not be stopped. The pro-mining forces now seemed to be clearly ascendant.

Then on 30 March a small story appeared in the press about an accident in a US nuclear plant. Authorities were playing it down, saying that "nothing critical had failed". 24 hours later there were front page headlines about "US Nuclear Terror". Ernest Titterton sought to reassure us: "Even if this situation did happen in Australia, what of it? Nobody has been hurt. In short, there is no problem." Nevertheless, the disaster at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania immediately revitalised the anti-nuclear movement. The demonstrators were back in the streets, and the issue stayed alive in the union movement until the early eighties.

Unfortunately, the unions also remained divided. The AWU, which had members in the mines, wanted no part of uranium bans, nor did the right wing Ironworkers and Federated Clerks, while the Miscellaneous Workers' Union, despite having an anti-nuclear policy on the books, was recruiting members in the mines to avoid losing ground to rival organisations. Other unions called for bans, but were reluctant to impose them where they really mattered, as with the Waterside Workers Federation of whom the Bulletin reported in late 1979:

Bob Hawke was now able to call the anti-uranium cause "an exercise in futility", arguing with considerable logic: "I've flown over Nabarlek, I've seen it, and by the end of this year ... the operation will have finished. Now there weren't phantoms there mining ... they were all members of the Australian trade union movement, serviced by Australian trade unions." The ACTU was risking "a national Newport". Hawke knew how little the left officials had done to mobilise the rank and file in action behind their policies. As with Newport, they had relied on resolution-mongering, and by 1982 a union working party revealed just how impotent the resolutions had been: in the five years since the unions had formally adopted a hard-line anti-uranium policy there had been 102 shipments of yellow-cake out of Australia.

This dismal result was not inevitable, for anti-uranium sentiment was fairly strong in the union rank and file. Unionists had established workplace groups at militant sites such as the Williamstown Dockyards, and Adelaide's Islington Railway Workshops. The Williamstown group opened a weekly "Keep it in the ground shop" at lunch time and held meetings in a nearby hotel, and their members were also involved in establishing locality groups at Williamstown and Altona. A Public Servants Against Uranium Mining group sprang up in Victoria.

When MAUM sponsored a national tour by Mt Isa miner John Boyd, he was well received on ships, on the wharves and by local Labor Councils. After he addressed construction workers at a Geelong oil refinery, they walked off the job as a protest against uranium mining. In November 1979 150 shop stewards signed a national open letter to a special unions conference demanding action. In Brisbane, the Workers Against Uranium Mining group successfully agitated for a job delegates' meeting, which in turn demanded action from the ACTU and the Queensland Trades and Labor Council. Shortly afterwards the ETU announced they were instructing their members to withdraw from the MKU mine. This was a token action, disregarded by the members on the job, but it showed that the officials were under pressure from the rank and file in Brisbane.

Given the chance, many of the rank and file were also willing to act -- even without much official backing. After Sargeants/ANI won a contract for 4000 tons of steel for the Ranger mine, AMWU members there voted to ban it. When management then tried to subcontract the work out to smaller engineering shops, workers at Evans Deakin voted to take the same anti-uranium stand, despite the risk of losing 20 jobs. Bernie Mendis, AMWU shop steward at Sargeants, pleaded for wider action: "If other stewards and unions start pulling their weight, we won't be isolated." Unfortunately, although similar bans were in place at Johns and Waygood in Victoria, the movement never achieved the generalised solidarity required.

Industrial action continued however. As late as 1981 the maritime unions were still making it difficult to export yellowcake. In May the Parella did manage to get around bans by the Seamen's Union when waterside workers agreed to load it. The ship then left without tugs. However protest demonstrations greeted it in Canada. Meanwhile in Darwin, the two key maritime unions were more united and managed to hold up twenty containers of yellowcake for several months before they were spirited out using non-union labour. Almost immediately they managed to ban another seven containers, holding up an equal number of vessels until threats of government legal action forced them to retreat.

Protest actions also continued, for example in South Australia where the new Liberal government was proceeding with mining at Honeymoon and Roxby Downs. Demonstrators occupied the Honeymoon site in May, raising the land rights flag and pulling down a fence. In October they were back to set up a peace camp nearby. In August-September 1983 people came from all over Australia to blockade Roxby Downs.

But while the movement had slowed the development of the nuclear industry -- and probably prevented atomic reactors being built in Australia -- mining and export went ahead, with workers on the mining sites suffering the most immediate consequences. In 1981, 180 employees at the Ranger mine struck for two weeks over safety issues. Again in October 1983 Ranger workers went on strike, after discovering their drinking water was contaminated with radioactive material.

The anti-uranium cause was linked to strong anti-war traditions in the labour movement and the left. Many of the activists came from the Vietnam era, or from campaigns against nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. In the seventies Victoria had seen a battle over construction of the US communications base Omega. Then, just as the movement against uranium mining declined at the start of the 1980s, public concern began to grow about a new surge in the global arms race.

For decades the US-Soviet arms race had been governed by the doctrine of "Mutually Assured Destruction". However under the Reagan presidency, American military strategists began thinking about "winnable" nuclear war, an alarming development which accompanied a sharp polarisation between the two great powers. In response, mass movements arose around the globe demanding peace. In Australia many of the people who had sustained the anti-uranium campaign now reappeared in groups such as People for Nuclear Disarmament (PND). They were joined in the streets by huge crowds, whose fears about the "new cold war" were by no means irrational: the Office of National Assessments, Australia's intelligence co-ordinating body, estimated that there was a 50 percent chance of nuclear war.

Smaller actions complemented the big marches. People were prepared to travel immense distances to camp outside the US communication bases at places like Pine Gap near Alice Springs, where they staged generally non-violent but defiant blockades accompanied by token invasions. When the US warship Goldsborough visited Australia in late 1982, demonstrators met it with pickets in Brisbane, then with a full mobilisation in Melbourne.

Students together with some of the more left wing off-campus activists set up a tent village on the beach near Station Pier, and skirmished with police guarding the ship, while watersiders walked off the job, the ARU banned freight shipments in the area and the AMWU banned repairs. Despite a split in the peace movement, reflecting the more right wing central organisers' hostility to the student and left forces, Students for Nuclear Disarmament were able to rally 2000 people in the City Square. The crowd marched to Flinders Street station, poured onto trains and arrived at the pier -- just in time to rescue the central organisers, whose rival rally at the pier (called for the same time to undermine the students) had been a dismal flop.

In Perth, where visits by US warships (all with tactical nuclear weapons capacity) had a long history, large mobilisations against them continued as part of the new peace movement. Up to 50,000 US naval personnel visited the city in 1982, and demonstrators were on hand. The local anti-nuclear movement explained: "The American sailors should be accepted in their private capacity. But as representatives of a nuclear war machine which threatens our population, there is no way that their presence should be tolerated."

The anti-uranium movement seemed to have revived in a new guise, given the overlap of issues and activists, yet there were important differences. Organisations like PND had not simply followed on from the anti-uranium movement; in some ways they had arisen out of its defeat. The attempt to stop uranium mining through aggressive political campaigns and above all through working class action had failed, and both the make up and the style of the subsequent peace campaigns reflected the fact: they were far more middle class. It was true that most people marching in the streets were still workers, but they were generally present as individuals, not as trade unionists. While various unions were affiliated to the peace organisations, there were no workplace groups, no industrial action, no riveting ACTU debates.

To a degree this situation resulted from circumstances beyond the peace movement's control, since there was much less focus for industrial action. What could the average factory worker black ban? It was also true that the union militants had lost confidence after the Newport and uranium defeats, and would have been hard to revitalise. But the most prominent anti-nuclear leaders did more than register this fact: they positively welcomed it, seeing in it an opportunity to embrace more mild mannered tactics, to give more weight to the churches and the more conservative outer-suburban locality groups. Key people in Melbourne PND argued explicitly that if the movement became more middle class, this would bring greater influence, while even a supposedly Marxist PND leader such as Belinda Probert could suggest in all seriousness that "today socialists need the Christians to extend and deepen the ethical arguments for socialism" within the movement [in D McKnight, Moving Left, p. 57]. Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that the main disarmament rallies were exceptionally bland affairs.

Inevitably, a variety of middle class political ideas gained in influence. The anti-uranium movement had already included pacifist currents who regarded non-violence as an absolute principle. These now grew considerably in strength, and argued against proposals for militant action. We also heard more from those people, also present in the earlier campaigns but restrained by the strong union presence, who thought the nuclear menace transcended class. Since the bomb threatened to wipe out the human race, some argued, capitalists could be mobilised against it just as effectively as workers. The main leaders of the movement who were drawn from the right wing of MAUM, the stodgy traditional disarmament group CICD, sections of the ALP and the remnants of the Communist Party, seized on these arguments with alacrity -- thinking they would widen the movement's appeal.

Superficially, it seemed to work. The crowds in the streets were bigger than the anti-uranium marches had ever been. But these crowds had remarkably little impact. When Fraser and later the new Prime Minister Bob Hawke made trivial gestures in the direction of promoting disarmament, this was generally enough to get them off the hook. Whereas the anti-uranium movement had been able to make a major impact on the national political agenda for several years, the disarmament campaign had no comparable effect.

It was far too insipid. No government was going to be overawed by people who marched on Palm Sunday, led by Christians with palm leaves; no militarist was going to lose any sleep over the Gardeners for Peace ("There are three principles of peacemaking which I see operating in our garden.") The movement's internal life was so flat that in most cities its organising committees were bureaucratic shells. Only in Melbourne were there sizeable general meetings or a strong network of local groups, and even in Melbourne this was more a hangover from previous campaigns than a sign of real vitality.

There was one rather positive aspect of the peace movement's internal life: it confronted different and more diverse political issues, making it in some ways more interesting than MAUM. The leftists within it had to address the issue of Soviet nuclear weapons, leading to sharp debates between older, pro-Soviet elements who had joined the movement in response to the disarmament slogan (an icon of Russian propaganda), and newer elements unwilling to swallow claims that Soviet weapons were "defensive". The movement in Melbourne eventually decided, over stiff opposition, to condemn the arsenals of both superpowers.

A second issue concerned "multilateral" versus "unilateral" disarmament, a debate harking back to the British peace movement of the sixties. The multilateralists looked to superpower negotiations to end the arms race while the unilateralists considered they had a particular responsibility to confront the militarism of their own rulers, an approach PND leader Joe Camilleri explained by citing a Dutch slogan: "Let all Europe disarm but let it happen in Holland first." Translated into the framework of the two imperialist blocs, this meant concentrating on disarming the western powers. Odd as it might seem, most of the pro-Soviet elements disliked this approach. They generally preferred multilateralism because it conformed to the Kremlin's foreign policy. It was mostly newer, more radical activists who were both critical of the USSR and prepared to adopt the more trenchant unilateralist standpoint. This included revolutionaries who adhered to the socialist slogan that "the main enemy is at home".

Unfortunately, the political debates didn't lead to many useful practical conclusions. Unilateral disarmament mostly meant calls for the Americans to disarm before the Russians, and even this emphasis tended to disappear in the mass marches which simply promoted peace in its most general sense. Attempts by the left within the movement to focus attention on the American communication bases in Australia -- sites which offered targets for militant action -- had only limited success. In some cases the debates led to dead ends, as with certain arguments about feminism. Encouraged by a women's peace camp at the Greenham Common missile base in Britain, a number of activists began arguing that women were naturally more peaceful, hence best suited to wage the struggle against war. A series of women-only or women-led actions followed. Feminists had been suggesting since the later stages of the anti-uranium movement that women could achieve a new consciousness that would more effectively challenge the nuclear industry:

Such arguments had considerable appeal in the later stages of the disarmament campaign, when the movement began to sense it was achieving little. "Peace feminism" became a fad for a time in the early eighties, yet it could not solve the movement's difficulties. Firstly, apart from a certain novelty value it was not clear what staging women-only actions achieved concretely except to limit the numbers who could participate. Secondly, there was the nagging reality that women were participating on both sides of the battle over nuclear energy. For example Eileen Ekblom and Joy Baluch, the mayors of Whyalla and Port Augusta, were both female, and both supported uranium mining at Roxby Downs. The supposed links between feminist consciousness and alternative energy systems found no practical application, nor could they. The strength of "peace feminism" was essentially a reflection of the middle class nature of the movement, a sign of its underlying weakness rather than a source of strength.

What the uranium miners were to the Northern Territory, the Hydro-Electric Commission was to Tasmania. By the end of the seventies, the HEC had succeeded in sacrificing Lake Pedder to its endless appetite, before proceeding to destroy the Pieman River system. Next they intended to dam the Franklin River. But in 1980 Labor Premier Doug Lowe announced he would rescue the State's last great unspoilt river by making it a national park, proposing a smaller dam on the Gordon River to replace the Franklin dam. Lowe was responding to a strong campaign by environmentalists.

The HEC immediately counterattacked, mobilising allies on both sides of parliament, and the Upper House rejected Lowe's plan. When he tried to hold a referendum which included the option of "no dams" he was rolled again, and forced to limit the referendum to his compromise proposal alongside the HEC plan. In November the party dumped him as leader. But the referendum itself brought a dramatic result: 47 percent for the HEC scheme, 8 percent for Lowe's compromise, and a remarkable 45 percent voting informal -- most of them writing "no dams" on the ballot. The electorate was effectively divided in two. When Labor lost office in 1982, Robin Gray's Liberals took office determined to dam the Franklin.

The "no dams" vote showed that opposition was growing, as was the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS). These environmentalists had compelling arguments. The region was magnificent: The Age called it "a land of grand river valleys as unspoilt as the first Eden, and still remote enough to evoke that sense of wonder that the first explorers might have felt." There were caves along the Franklin sacred to Aborigines and of immense archaeological importance. If the HEC got its way more dams were likely, since the Commission had three more big projects in mind for the area. To claims that the scheme was needed to create jobs, the TWS's Bob Brown responded by citing the historical record: "Through hydro industrialisation we have got 13 industries using 66 percent of the State's power and providing 6 percent of the State's jobs."

Buoyed by a 14,000-strong anti-dam march in Melbourne, the TWS launched a a write-in campaign for the December 1982 Flinders by-election. Once again they triumphed when 41 percent wrote "no dams" on their ballot papers. Next they organised a blockade of the construction sites. Scores of people camped in the vicinity while a $37,000-a-day police force assembled to confront them. The protesters set out in dinghies to obstruct the work, whereupon the cops systematically arrested them. Despite Robin Gray's description of the activists as "fanatics" the only violence occurred when a group of pro-dams young men invaded the TWS's Strahan headquarters, threw furniture about and assaulted one of the environmentalists.

Within days 100 people had been jailed. On 22 December 3000 people rallied in Hobart to counter claims by Robin Gray that most Tasmanians favoured the dam, then a day later four Aboriginal activists visited Kutikina ("spirit") Cave, also called Fraser Cave, where Michael Mansell told the press:

After ten days and hundreds of arrests, the blockaders stopped to rest over Christmas, while the debate raged on. There was little hope that Robin Gray would relent, so attention focussed on Canberra. The federal government tried to dodge the conflict on the grounds that it was a State issue, but as the clamour mounted Fraser came under increasing pressure. The "States' rights" argument was weak to start with, for the same federal government had stepped in to stop the export of mineral sands from Fraser Island, despite complaints by the Queensland Premier; it became weaker after the World Heritage Committee listed the Southwest Tasmanian Wilderness Area, on the Fraser government's own recommendation. Surely Fraser was now obliged to protect the Franklin. The PM finally offered the Tasmanian government $500 million to build and subsidise an alternative, coal-fired facility, an offer which Gray contemptuously refused.

By now the federal Liberals had begun to crack. Four government senators crossed the floor on the issue, about 20 backbenchers met top Coalition leaders to discuss it, and the president of the Young Liberals foreshadowed an anti-dams motion at their national convention. Three ministers were wavering. The unease in the Coalition grew further when a poll showed sizeable numbers of swinging voters were concerned about the issue.

Early January brought a new round of protests and arrests. In Strahan, Aborigines set up a tent embassy and announced plans to visit archaeological sites, for which Michael Mansell said they had not sought permission: "We consider it to be our land, and the white man's tresspass laws do not apply to us." Then at the start of February Malcolm Fraser called a general election, so the movement shifted gears, calling a mass "Rally for Reason" which brought 12,000 or more into Hobart streets. The turnout, said the local Mercury newspaper, "stunned most people":

The first day of March was set as "Green Day", to be the occasion for further direct action. Again there were dire warnings of violence, from Robin Gray and the Mercury, which again proved utterly baseless, though police arrested 228 protesters on the river. (The closest thing to violence occurred when pro-dam elements threw washing powder and nuts at conservationists in the Strahan TWS shop.) Greenies in Hobart hoisted a "No Dams" flag atop the HEC building while others welded themselves into a steel cage outside.

The direct action made the TWS campaign rather exciting, which somewhat obscured the fact that it continued -- and perhaps accelerated -- the rightward trend in Australia's environmental movements. Where the Newport and uranium campaigns had a strong working class content, and the disarmament movement had still relied primarily on ordinary people, the Franklin campaigners depended much more heavily on backing by liberal sections of the ruling class, who did not see the need to further develop Tasmania's already huge power generation systems given the environmental cost. A group of 60 Tasmanian businessmen commissioned a report which concluded that money should be spent on job creation schemes rather than hydro-electric power, and the protesters near Strahan camped on a ten acre site provided by a local landlord, after arriving on a cruise boat provided by a tourist firm. Electronics entrepreneur Dick Smith helped fund the campaign. When English botanist and environmental campaigner David Bellamy arrived to join the protests, he made a point of affirming his admiration for Malcolm Fraser as well as his support for the royal family -- and indeed both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh were backing the no-dams campaigners.

The TWS had financial resources other protest movements could only dream of. Dick Smith made a generous donation, while a fund appeal in late 1982 had prompted 100 people to send $1000 or more. One informed estimate put the TWS's annual turnover at around $1 million, compared to about $200,000 for the anti-uranium movement, and the society could afford the services of a market research company and an advertising agency.

Moreover the Society's politics were middle class in the most literal sense. "Dr Brown's vision," reported The Age, "is of Tasmania as a much more highly decentralised tourist resort with many more small, labour-intensive and preferably locally owned industries ... " Brown himself, according to historian Verity Burgmann, "conformed absolutely to middle class notions of respectability." [Power and Protest, p. 200] It was hardly surprising, then, that the "no-dams" write-in effort during the Flinders by-election was supported by 32 percent of Liberal voters, or that the Young Liberals and various government MPs supported the TWS campaign.

While trade unions on the mainland were often sympathetic, the TWS did not make much of an effort to win over unionists in their own State. The main reason trade unionists were sceptical about the no-dams campaign was that unemployment was particular high in Tasmania -- but notwithstanding the "Jobs Not Dams" chants at the Hobart rally, the TWS never made a serious effort to discuss the unemployment issue with unionists. When pressed by a socialist interviewer, Bob Brown admitted in early 1982:

Brown was careful to add that "I don't mean the members of unions, I mean the officers," and that many of the rank and file were sympathetic. But the movement had never attempted to organise this rank and file as workers the way sections of the anti-uranium movement had done. Its approaches to the union movement consisted of formal appeals to union bureaucrats. The anti-uranium experience of building links with workers on the job had been lost.

The limitations of the movement were equally clear in two other, apparently unconnected, aspects of the campaign. The demonstrators on the river were a select band, who had all been through special non-violence training. To join the actions you had to do the training, and if you'd been away for a while you needed a two-day refresher course. By definition, this precluded rapid mobilisation of large numbers of ordinary working people. That was why, although some people in the uranium and disarmament campaigns had also argued for non-violence training, they had generally remained isolated, for these movements relied on getting large numbers into the streets. The TWS campaign, however, relied mainly on assembling smaller numbers in a remote area for prolonged periods, during which they were cast in the role of an heroic elite, a status the non-violence training reinforced. True, there were also mass rallies in the cities, but those who joined them had been assigned a supporting part.

One reason for the special training, according to a non-violence instructor at Strahan, was that "we have to look to our public image, and our course has been worked out partly according to how we think the public would respond ... " This reflected the fact that for all the direct action and demonstrations, the TWS leadership was primarily interested in the electoral and parliamentary sphere. They had set up branches in several marginal federal electorates as early as May 1982. In early March 1983, as it became clear that Labor would win the election, the TWS called off the direct action and reduced its presence on the west coast to a watchdog camp. The battle, they said, was "all but won". In fact Bob Brown had predicted in late January that "the Franklin will be saved by an election campaign, not by a blockade."

And after winning the election, Bob Hawke did intervene to preserve the Franklin River. It was an encouraging victory after so many defeats on the environmental front, but it was in some ways also a damaging one for the left, because it spawned dangerous illusions. At a time when the class struggle and social movements were in decline, it gave environmentalists an illusory feeling of power, and much of the left spent the following decade in futile efforts to rebuild itself by tailing after "green politics". The victory also gave an artificial boost to advocates of "non-violent action" and electoral tactics, since these appeared to have worked so well. The reality -- that victory came so easily only because important sections of the bourgeoisie had opposed the dams -- could be brushed aside.

The no-dams struggle of 1983 showed how much the political climate had changed in less than a decade. Socialists, who had been conspicuous in earlier campaigns, had trouble even selling a paper or two at no-dams rallies. Working class struggle, so important in the uranium movement, had been sidelined by the disarmament campaign, and most people working to save the Franklin did not even think about it. Bob Hawke, who had betrayed the struggle against uranium mining, could make hay out of the no-dams issue. That Fraser could not cope with it simply showed that by 1982 he had lost control of Australian politics generally, and had forfeited the confidence of his own supporters.

Back to opening page